Environmental Issues: International Issues

All Documents in International Issues Tagged dirty fuels

As cheap, plentiful conventional oil becomes a luxury of the past, we now face a choice: to set a course for a more sustainable energy future of clean, renewable fuels, or to develop ever-dirtier sources of transportation fuel derived from fossil fuels -- at an even greater cost to our health and environment. Looking for fuel in all the wrong places puts wildlands, air, water and climate at risk.

Documents Tagged dirty fuels in All Sections

Proponents of the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline engaged in a major disinformation campaign in a desperate attempt to win approval for the 1,700-mile pipeline though America's heartland. The facts reveal this pipeline was never in America's national interest.

Tar sands crude oil pipeline companies may be putting America's public safety at risk. Increasingly, pipelines transporting tar sands crude oil into the United States are carrying diluted bitumen or "DilBit" -- a highly corrosive, acidic, and potentially unstable blend of thick raw bitumen and volatile natural gas liquid condensate -- raising risks of spills and damage to communities along their paths. The impacts of tar sands production are well known. Tar sands extraction in Canada destroys Boreal forests and wetlands, causes high levels of greenhouse gas pollution, and leaves behind immense lakes of toxic waste. Less well understood, however, is the increased risk and potential harm that can be caused by transporting the raw form of tar sands oil (bitumen) through pipelines to refineries in the United States. Get document in pdf.

The Canadian pipeline company TransCanada has proposed a tar sands pipeline that could bring as much as 900,000 barrels per day (bpd) of costly and polluting fuel to the U.S. Gulf Coast. This pipeline, called Keystone XL, will lock the United States into a dependence on hard-to-extract oil and generate a massive expansion of the destructive tar sands oil operations in Canada. In addition to the damage that would be caused by the increased tar sands extraction, the pipeline threatens to pollute freshwater supplies in America’s agricultural heartland and increase emissions in already-polluted communities of the Gulf Coast. Get document in pdf.

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Stop the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline

In Canada's boreal forest, the Peace-Athabasca Delta is a haven for millions of migratory birds. It's no place for even more tar sands development, which is already poisoning the boreal forest's rivers and lakes.